Author: Ethan Theo

Abe WalkingBear Sanchez is an International Speaker / Trainer / Consultant on the subject of cash flow / sales enhancement and business knowledge organization and use. Founder and President of www.armg-usa.com, WalkingBear has authored hundreds of business articles, has worked with numerous companies in a wide range of industries since 1982 and has spoken at many venues including the Shakespeare Globe Theater in London.

Categories
Branding

Many Hands Build the Brand

This is an article submitted by Ken Wisnefski. Submit your article! Find out more.
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Introduction
Do you think there is a corner in the world where you can find a computer user who does not know of Microsoft? Is there anyone in the world who looks for information on the Web and has never heard of Google? These names are indelibly ingrained in our brains. Did you ever think of why?
Both companies are world renown. They have molded a brand name that is synonymous with success. Most experts will tell you that you need experience, excellent service/product, ingenuity, and commitment to become a success. These are all ingredients in becoming successful, but more help comes from customers than most think.
You need to provide optimal services or products to become popular with the public. Most celebrated companies will be happy to sell services and products and hope their acclaim continues. Some of the best companies do not realize their satisfied customers can become their most powerful marketing tool.
The customer knows best
It is important to foster a rapport with your customers, regardless of the size of your business. Experts in customer management will tell you that ideally, you want to make the customer-to-business relationship as personal as possible. The dynamic should be comparable to that of a mom and pop shop located in a remote, small town with their second to third generation customers.
How can you inspire this relationship? Listen to your customers. Comprise a customer testimonial page on your Web site. Customer testimonials can be incorporated into newsletters and fliers, but it will be seen by most on your Web site.
Promote testimonials
For most, the customer testimonial page (if there is one) is usually discreetly showcased, accessible through an obscure link somewhere on the bottom of the home page. This is a mistake.
Positive customer feedback needs to be exhibited as strongly as other content on the site. Browsers will come across testimonials and relate to the authors. Those who testified were once like them – looking for a provider of goods/services.
Good testimonials should be completely overt and conspicuous for all to see. Everyone knows that each business will have positive things to say about themselves through their content, but the customers can give unbiased, objective information. This is what a potential customer wants to see – no inside advertising, just the facts.
Building the Brand
Once a business has accumulated and read a large number of testimonials, they can begin to see patterns in responses. What exactly about the products/services is so appealing to the customers? What products/services get the most positive feedback? What (if anything) needs to be improved? What separates the company from the competition? Finding the answer to these questions will begin to shape the image of your brand.
Most companies believe that they choose their brand. They believe the public at large will accept what they are told. There is too much competition for people to be persuaded into accepting something before they have proof of its veracity.
Testimonials can aid in building the brand of your business. A “brand” is about perception and your testimonials are just that – the perception of your customers. Word-of-mouth is the greatest marketing tool imaginable, but costs a business nothing in advertising costs. The investment comes from having an excellent product/service to provide.
The dynamic of the interaction between a business and its customers is the “brand.” If a business has customers that have positive associations towards the business, this equals the “image” of the business. The image is shared by the existing customers and is to be potentially shared by new customers.
Getting Practical
Thus far, it may seem that we have been speaking theoretically, and not about how to come up with a physical brand (logo, slogan).
Working with a graphic designer can ameliorate the process of composing a logo. The logo should originate from the feeling that comes from the customer feedback.
Collect the testimonials and survey them for likenesses. What adjectives are used to describe your business? What analogies or references are made in relation to your business? Is your business prided on speed? Is it prided on efficiency? Is it prided on customer service? Create a symbol based on a conglomeration of the feedback. This will be your logo.
The same process can be used for a slogan. A slogan usually will have something to do with the mission statement or the ideology of the business (Ex: eBay – “The World’s Online Marketplace”), but it can be a combination of this and the relationship with the customers (Wegmans – “Everyday You Get Our Best”). It is best to combine the company’s mission with what it can provide for its public. The choice is yours, but the latter seems to make more of a connection with the customer.
Ken Wisnefski is the president of VendorSeek.com, a site that specializes in connecting business consumers with qualified vendors from an Approved Vendor Network that provide competitive price quotes for their specific service category.

Categories
Finance & Capital

10 Sources Of Startup Funds

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Businessknowhow: Why don’t more people start their own business?
If you answered, “lack of funds” you’re right on the money.
In various ways, money – getting enough to start the business and worry about not making enough money to replace the income and benefits from a full-time job – is one of the biggest deterrents to would-be business owners.
Nevertheless hundreds of thousands of individuals start businesses each year. How do they do it? Where do they get the money to get started? Here are ten solutions for startup funding for a micro-sized business. Some are nearly risk-free. Others involve significant financial risk and should be used with caution.
1 – Start part-time.
2 – Start the business from home.
3 – Get advance commitments for work.
4 – Get a part-time job.
5 – Live frugally.
6 – Use a credit card.
7 – Apply for a home equity line of credit.
8 – Apply for business loan.
9 – Ask Your Bank About an SBA-guaranteed loan.
10 – Borrow from family and friends.
Where to Get Money to Start a Business [Businessknowhow]

Categories
Work Life

The New Work Revolution – Balanced Lifestyle

management.jpgManagement has always been a fashion horse incorporating the latest ‘new’ inventions. They are dreamt up by business-seeking consultants sweeping away the last lot of expensively-bought solutions. Fortunately, business managers have a good deal of common sense and resist the more outlandish offerings in favour of prudent finance, disciplined control and measured risk-taking.
But management really is changing this time because the people being managed have changed. Their education, aspirations, life expectancy, pension needs and knowledge of the options open to them have all developed dramatically in the last ten years.
The ‘Marketing Era’ of the seventies and eighties gave way to the ‘Balanced Life Style Era’ of the nineties. With the dawn of the new millennium we entered the reality of the long-heralded ‘Global Village Era’. You may applaud it, you may deplore it. It is here to stay.
Impose ‘Global Village’ on ‘Balanced Life Style’ and you get a mighty clash of cultures. In the Global Village we all have to compete as never before for our sales. That means more work. In our Balanced Life Style we want to make work only a part of our lives. We expect family, home, leisure, further education and travel to play their part in creating the ’rounded’ and fulfilled person we all aspire to be. So we want less work. Hence the clash.

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JohnBittlestonPhoto.jpgJohn Bittleston blogs at TerrificMentors.com, a site that provides mentoring for those who wish a change in career or job, wanting to start a business or looking to improve their handling of people (including themselves).

Categories
Technology

The New Work Revolution – Global Village

The Global Village is driven by technology.
It began with television, telecoms and travel. Gradually, stumblingly we learnt about other people – not just where they were on the map but how they lived, what they thought, what they needed, what they aspired to. At first it was a peek at their quaint, sometimes bizarre, lifestyles, customs and practices. Mother T and Bob Geldorf brought us down to earth. Mother T talked for over fifty years about the poorest of the poor until we began to realise they demanded more than an odd coin in the collector’s tin. Geldorf held The Concert and began a massive, serious movement of giving.
Famine, earthquake, flood – all the natural disasters – became the real on-line drama of life. So did the media-monitored terrorist attacks. We went to look but we also went to help. We rounded on our religious superiors for their patronising, ‘heaven next’ approach. As the final notes of our evening prayers resonated through the great Cathedral, Mosque or Temple we began to feel that to follow them with a slap-up, four course dinner washed down with a good hearty drink was not always the best response to those without shelter, food and medicine.
For business, the Global Village offered markets beyond the wildest dreams of our fathers and grandfathers. We were now selling finished goods to people some of whom were beginning to have enough in their pockets for more than the bare essentials. It seemed as though growth was guaranteed forever. Expansion was the name of the game.
People who achieve a little discretionary spending soon want a little more… and a little more. They are willing to work for it at rates that make the present producers look very expensive. ‘Lowest cost’ drives production – and, increasingly, services (call centres, for example) – to where it can be done most economically, leaving in its wake a trail of redundancies, bankruptcies and capital shortages.
All this will shift unemployment – gradually, at first – from the destitute to the well-off, the very people who are seeking a Balanced Life Style.

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JohnBittlestonPhoto.jpgJohn Bittleston blogs at TerrificMentors.com, a site that provides mentoring for those who wish a change in career or job, wanting to start a business or looking to improve their handling of people (including themselves).

Categories
Operations

The Importance of a Company’s Culture

company-culture.jpgWe notice other people’s personalities. Usually we come quickly to a view about them. First impressions are important – and seldom wrong. Another’s personality is his or her culture. It reflects their background and character.
When you are thinking of joining a company you do your due diligence, finding out about it from its web site, its published accounts, its press reports and the views of anyone you think knows it well enough to be worth listening to.
How much can you learn about the company from these sources? Quite a lot, actually. But if you stick only to the hard data you will miss the most important consideration in deciding whether to join it – its culture.
Culture is the way a company behaves, the way it treats its customers, staff, suppliers and its other stakeholders. Every company has a culture. It is the only truly Unique Selling Proposition (USP) it has. Every other advantage it claims over competitors will be matched by their claims. Their culture is unrepeatable.
Where does a culture come from? The founder(s) of a company give it its original culture. The current bosses decide today’s culture.
How does a culture manifest itself? It is the sum of everything it does but it can be seen in the smallest individual act. The greeting by the receptionist, the treatment of suppliers who have not been paid promptly, what happens to staff when they resign – all these emanate from the culture of the business. If the faces of the staff are pinched and tired and look like scared rabbits you’ve got a Genghis Khan culture. If the staff smile, appear open with each other, cooperate, know their products, help but don’t hassle, you’ve got a good CEO in charge – and a good culture.
There are many simple ways of testing the culture of a business. One that I employ is to deliberately turn up at the wrong reception area and see how the staff there handle it. I don’t have to tell you the difference between the supermarket where they take you to the shelf of the product you are seeking and the one where they point in a vague direction and let you find it for yourself.
So it is with companies; some are helpful, some are not. A company that doesn’t help its customers or its suppliers won’t help its staff either.
A friend of mine recently resigned from an MNC after a fairly short career with the company. My friend came to the wholly reasonable conclusion that all-night working on the odd occasion was acceptable but when it was regularly four nights in a row, it wasn’t.
If you had been the boss what would you have done in that situation? Not, I hope, what the MNC did.
They harassed, attempted to bribe the person to stay, and finally openly bullied their departing employee – especially when two more employees walked out for much the same reasons.
What did they achieve?
Massive alienation by a significant number of people who will never touch their products again. That’s the sort of PR you don’t need.
What should they have done?
Talked a little, listened a lot. They could have learnt a golden lesson, had a well-disposed ex-employee, achieved good PR. They might even have kept the employee they feared to lose. Most of all, they might have understood the problem they had created.
But their culture didn’t allow them what they saw as a soft approach so they took the only one they knew. Trouble is, blowing out the brains of departing employees isn’t actually a very clever way to keep them – or anyone else – on side.
I wonder if they’ll learn that.

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JohnBittlestonPhoto.jpgJohn Bittleston blogs at TerrificMentors.com, a site that provides mentoring for those who wish a change in career or job, wanting to start a business or looking to improve their handling of people (including themselves).